Metodologia

Guido Huelsmann on scientism and the state of the modern economics profession

JD: Especially Part I of Human Action, which is more philosophical. What strikes me about reading the book, and his earlier work, is the fearless approach to philosophy, sociology, and ethics, fields beyond economics. Today the trendy word is intersectionality, where academic disciplines come together, but he certainly felt capable of addressing the bigger picture beyond his academic confines. Today academics are criticized if they wander too far from their chosen specialty.

GH: Yes, that’s right, it is especially strong in economics. But, the truth is that the way young economists are trained today, they are turned into morons because all that they learn is to mimic the natural sciences. They learn how to apply econometric methods to datasets, and of course in order to do this you don’t really need any training in economics. You can come from any natural science. You can come from engineering, you can come from mathematics, you can come from physics, it doesn’t matter, as long as you know a little bit about mathematics and applied mathematics.

You take one or two years of classes in econometrics, you’re there. Anybody can do this. You don’t need any knowledge of economic literature, you don’t need any knowledge of economic history, you don’t need any acquaintance with praxeological analysis, the logical analysis of human action, which we find in classical economics and in Austrian economics.

You don’t need any of this because all that you do is to look at data and to apply methods that people from all other walks of scientific life would and could apply if they had no idea what economics was all about. This is the work of a moron. Unsurprisingly, these people typically have great difficulties engaging in interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary work with scholars from the social sciences, and also with philosophers and jurists.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/…/todays-leading-mises-scholar…/

And here's his (our) mentor Hoppe's summary of what economics is about:

“Essentially, economic analysis consists of: (1) an understanding of the categories of action and an understanding of the meaning of a change in values, costs, technological knowledge, etc.; (2) a description of a situation in which these categories assume concrete meaning, where definite people are identified as actors with definite objects specified as their means of action, with definite goals identified as values and definite things specified as costs; and (3) a deduction of the consequences that result from the performance of some specified action in this situation, or of the consequences that result for an actor if this situation is changed in a specified way. And this deduction must yield a priori-valid conclusions, provided there is no flaw in the very process of deduction and the situation and the change introduced into it being given, and a priori—valid conclusions about reality if the situation and situation-change, as described, can themselves be identified as real, because then their validity would ultimately go back to the indisputable validity of the categories of action.”– Hans-Hermann Hoppe

lewrockwell.com

The Leading Mises Scholar on the Man and His Legacy - LewRockwell LewRockwell.com

GH: I think so. The town where I went to high school in those years had the highest communist voter percentage in all of Western Germany. And this presence made itself felt also in the school, not necessarily among the teachers, although there was at least one communist, but especially among the stu...